Lucky

Can the $200 OLPC actually help people with an annual income of less than $700 ? 

I was reading about the OLPC or one laptop per child program, a group that has distributed a strange $200 laptop-ish rugged computer to people all around the world, mostly aimed at poor rural areas of the globe where information technology is not common (the digital divide), sold to governments in these areas, where the people could make better use of basic medicine, running water, reliable electricity, basic infrastructure that Americans take for granted!

Low Sales Volumes

Having shipped about 3 million units total, I am not sure I would call the OLPC successful given the proliferation of smartphones that have a better SOC (system on a chip) setup, a much more robust APP selection (iOS, Play Store), that are smaller, more energy efficient, and that sell by the tens of millions within a week of a new smartphone launch (Samsung, Apple).

Smartphones ?

I understand that a new $649 flagship smartphone like the iPhone 7 is not going to sell well in markets where that cost represents almost an entire year of income. The bigger question: how are people able to survive with almost no income ? It seems the issue of 7 billion people and overpopulation are far worse then I had previously realized. I do not mean to sound ignorant, or stupid, I am a college educated scientist. I have never traveled to very poor areas of the world, my last international trip was to Tokyo, Japan! I guess I have been living in a bubble, isolated from the bleak reality that so many people face every day!

Lucky

I feel extremely deeply lucky to live in a nice area of the world that is blessed with economic opportunities, jobs that pay a lot more than $2/day, where most people have car insurance, and where the power & running water work 99% of the time. Thank you Lord God for all that you have blessed us with, your an amazing God and I pray that you will help these extremely unfortunate poor people in the world!

Industrialization of Steel, or not ?

~450 million tons of steel produced annually across the globe. I watched a Modern Marvels episode about Steel, and I find it remarkable how such a huge division in access to resources, technology, innovations, and infrastructure exists all around the world, negatively affecting such a huge percentage of earths people! Wow! How have so many people missed out on the benefits of the industrial revolution?

In La La Land!

I go on long tangents about the future of AI and how self driving cars and home robots are on the horizon, blind to the destitute poverty afflicting so many people. How can this reality exist? Industrial steel production reached globalization potential more than 50 years ago! Seems I would benefit from reading about subjects that normally never cross my consciousness! This gives me a lot more to Think about!

Intelligent Thinking Key

Thinking is the key, excess glucose in the diet enabling complex thought, the ideologies that people hold paving the way to our collective future here on earth, uniting the world into one super country, I believe that one way there will be a single nation, with a single language, where all people work together for their individual benefit and for the collective good of all people, where technology is used to create shared prosperity for everyone, where the ideas of money evolves into a greater understanding of energy, where all people understand that energy is what we need to do everything cool that creates shared prosperity!

Energy Technology Critical

Energy is the key to our future, the power to make information flow, to keep the lights on, to keep the internet going, to enable collaboration on huge scales with networked computers, cell towers LTE and smartphones, so that Space X can take us to Mars and beyond!

Solving All Problems

We can solve the space debris problem, we can solve all diseases. I believe we can engineer our way out of death itself, genetically engineering future generations! It is a bold, strange and interesting future we are facing, robotic home assistant robots just on the horizon as self driving cars are pipe-lined into commercial reality the world over; Uber and Tesla leading the charge today!